Skin and Bone--A Mystery Read online

  But now I thought how sweet it had been to be young and slippery with soap, and to stand laughing with arms wide to welcome the force of the hurled water against our bodies. I looked down at the dead baby in my hands and felt another pang of sorrow. Whether it was for this bud of unfulfilled humanity, or for my own lost and irrecoverable youth, I cannot say.

  Hannah returned with brush and pan, and cleared the sink of its webs and dust, after which I placed the baby inside. Then I lifted and covered it reverently with the sink’s wooden cover.

  ‘Hannah, I expect you to lock up and safeguard these remains to the utmost of your ability. It is getting late now and I can do no more today. But tomorrow I shall return with someone to help me examine it and we shall begin our investigation into this distressing event.’

  So I went outside to find the skinners shifting around and talking together urgently. They wanted to get away to their work before nightfall, but were uncertain in case I required them to remain. I told them at once that I didn’t and as they began to turn away, I called Ellen Kite to me.

  ‘Ellen, I shall be obliged if you would come to my office in Cheapside first thing in the morning. With the help of my clerk Mr Furzey I shall take your deposition.’

  She gave a bob of a curtsey, a politeness at odds with her mired and noxious working clothes, and said, ‘I come to market every Wednesday with my brother, Sir, bringing some of our leather goods to sell. As soon as we have the stall set up I’ll come to your door.’

  So they all went down the lane in a troop to their skin-yard. Beyond them the orange sun was already sidling towards the west where, in a couple of hours, it would lower itself, as into a bath, below the horizon.

  Chapter 2

  THE CORONER’S DUTY is to enquire into unexpected deaths, and I find it incomprehensible that my colleagues in other parts of the country imagine they can do this without medical assistance. How can you distinguish poisoning from the morbid failure of an organ, or tell deliberate suffocation from a natural death, simply by consulting law books? The second of these distinctions was one I was going to have to make in the case of the baby found in Cold Bath Lane and so, rather than going directly to the office, I headed first for the Fisher Gate lodgings of Luke Fidelis.

  My friend Dr Fidelis divided opinion in the town. He had come to Preston seven years earlier after learning his trade in Europe, principally at the university of Leyden where (as he once told me) there were always new ideas about disease fermenting like beer. But arriving back in Lancashire he found medical innovation far from popular, especially with the old ones in authority. ‘Tried and tested, never bested’, they would say; or ‘The old way’s God’s way and novelty is devilry’.

  Fidelis was all for stirring things up and would not hold his tongue about what he called the many useless and probably harmful practices of our more conventional physicians. He would produce lucid and (to the unbiased ear) not unpersuasive arguments against blood-letting, or cupping, or the timing of treatment by astrology, with the paradoxical result that his own methods came under adverse scrutiny by others. If Fidelis saw Preston’s other doctors as stuck in provincial ignorance, they regarded him as a dangerous foreign-educated upstart.

  But my friend had two qualities that stopped his practice from landing on the rocks: his good looks, which recommended him to many female patients (and a few male ones); and his habit of being – not on all, but on many of the more important questions – in the right. Even had I not already found him a good and stimulating friend, that would have been enough for me to seek his advice when the occasion demanded it.

  In answer to my knock a servant came to the door of bookbinder Lorris, at whose house Fidelis occupied comfortable lodgings on the topmost floor.

  ‘Doctor’s gone out of town, Mr Cragg,’ she said. ‘He’s riding upriver seeing patients.’

  ‘That is inconvenient. When do you expect him to return?’

  ‘Well, he’s been gone two days, and said he’d be back after three.’

  ‘If he returns earlier would you please tell him that I would like to consult him at his earliest convenience.’

  ‘I hope you are not unwell, Mr Cragg,’ said the maid.

  I assured her I was quite well, tipped my hat and set off up Fisher Gate towards the office adjoining my house on Cheapside.

  Here I briefed Furzey on what had been found at the spa, and dictated a note about it to the Mayor. It was expedient to keep the Chief Magistrate of Preston informed of my doings as Coroner, since I may in due course have to apply to him for fees and expenses, or to refer a criminal matter on to him.

  ‘We should have a visitor here in the morning, one Ellen Kite,’ I said as Furzey began tidying the writing desk in preparation for going to the home he shared with his mother. ‘She is our first finder and an intelligent young woman, though I fear you may nose her as she comes through the door.’

  Furzey grimaced.

  ‘Nose her? How’s that?’

  ‘She is from the tannery at the bottom of Cold Bath Lane.’

  Furzey slid from his stool and took an upright chair, which he carried to the window next to the outer door and set it down there.

  ‘Then when she comes she shall sit here with the window open and as far from my writing desk as may be.’

  * * *

  ‘What kind of mother has so much hate for her child that she throws it into a filthy tan-pit? Am I looking for a shameless whore, Lizzie?’

  Elizabeth and I were in our parlour after supper, playing a game of piquet.

  ‘No, Titus. You are looking for someone capable of shame. A respectable girl, even a poor one, who risks too much by having a baby unmarried. She might be cast out of her employment by it, or miss her chance of marriage. It is not an immoral girl who hides her condition and secretly gives birth.’

  ‘Legally speaking, the consequence for such a woman is terrible: she is a murderess. That is what I am now looking for, in law. A murderess.’

  She looked up from her cards with a frown. I forestalled her objection.

  ‘I know, you rightly object,’ I went on. ‘But the law on this is inflexible. There is a statute of King James the First, which was made specially to cover these cases. It lays down that any girl who conceals the birth of a child, if that babe subsequently dies, is presumed by the law to have murdered it.’

  ‘But that law is so monstrous, Titus! Babies are stillborn through no fault of the mother. To be hanged for murder of a stillborn child cannot be justice.’

  ‘Logically, you are right. It’s a fallacy, a case of cum hoc ergo propter hoc. However, I think the law when it was instigated was meant to serve some other object than logic – or for that matter justice.’

  ‘What do you mean my love? What other object can a law have?’

  ‘Moral policy, Lizzie. The Act was meant to stop carnal vices, and specifically to prevent young girls playing at hazard with their maidenheads. What could be a more terrifying prophylactic against immorality than a hanging?’

  ‘Well I do not like it when morality has a fight with justice. It makes me anxious. But the truth must be found out anyway. You must discover if the baby died before it was born.’

  ‘I agree, though it is difficult. The old law is much muttered against nowadays; even the Lord Chief Justice in London is known not to like it. I think if the bath-house baby was indeed stillborn we may save some poor girl from the gallows.’

  * * *

  Ellen Kite jangled the office bell at nine o’clock in the morning. Furzey had brought his mother’s perfume bottle into work. As I came through from my inner sanctum, I found him hastily preparing for our visitor by sousing his pocket handkerchief with lavender and civet.

  ‘Why do you look at me?’ he said, looking up. ‘My mother’ll tell you. I cannot abide a rank odour, me. I am made ill by it.’

  He hurried to throw open the window, then went with handkerchief at the ready to admit the witness. As he swung the door open he clapped the fr
agranced linen to his nose and gave her a muffled greeting.

  Ellen walked in with confidence. She wore her cleanest dress and had perhaps, before dressing, washed her body, for there was no sign of yesterday’s miasma about her. Unable to smell anything but old Dame Furzey’s civet, however, Furzey was not to know this and continued with the handkerchief clamped under his nostrils.

  Ellen looked at him with curiosity, and then at me.

  ‘Ah, this is my clerk Robert Furzey,’ I said. ‘Perhaps he has a nosebleed. Will you sit?’

  I closed the window and, dragging away the chair that Furzey had put there, repositioned it more centrally. Ellen settled herself while Furzey looked on from behind his handkerchief, his eyes incredulous of my actions. I pointed towards his desk.

  ‘Furzey to your writing, if you please,’ I said.

  My clerk shook his head but did as he was told, though without removing the handkerchief. I waited as he slid on to his stool and, with his one free hand, selected a sheet of paper from the drawer, put it in the writing position and dipped his pen.

  I said, ‘Now, Miss Kite … or is it Mrs?’

  ‘I am not married, Sir.’

  ‘Very well, but perhaps I may call you Ellen.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘So, Ellen, please will you tell us everything that happened yesterday after your dinner, from the moment you approached the tan-pits?’

  ‘You mean when I went there to handle the ooze and found the babby?’

  ‘Yes.’

  So, to the accompaniment of Furzey’s squeaky quill, she told how she had first raised the hides from the liquor by means of the lifting gear, and then taken the paddle and dipped it, pushing it right down to the bottom and stirring up the sludge that had settled there. She had then started moving crabwise around the pit, all the time stirring so that no part of the tanning liquor would remain undisturbed, and had reached halfway around when she felt the slight weight on the blade of the paddle. Lifting it she did not know what she had scooped up – perhaps a dead bird such as a duck. Only when she deposited it on the ground was she able to look closely. Then she had vomited up the whole of her dinner.

  ‘It was not a duck, Sir, but a babby. Cold, stiff and sodden in its filthy wrapping.’

  ‘And so you called for your father.’

  ‘No, I screamed for him.’

  ‘Had you seen a newborn baby before, Ellen?’

  ‘Yes, Sir. When my sister had hers.’

  ‘And have you seen a dead baby before, a newborn or stillborn child?’

  ‘No. Never ever.’

  ‘But you were in no doubt, all of you who saw it, that this baby was dead.’

  ‘Of course! How could it be alive, under the ooze?’

  ‘And can you think of anyone to whom this poor dead baby might belong? Do you know of any girl or woman from the skin-yard or round and about that had just given birth?’

  ‘I don’t know of any, no Sir. No one in skin-yard, and round about there’s only Mrs Scroop that lives on Water Lane.’

  ‘Good heavens! Has Mrs Scroop produced another little Scroop? Surely not so soon. It only seems the other day she had her last.’

  ‘That were last year, Mr Cragg. This babby came yesterday, so we’ve heard.’

  Mrs Helena Scroop was the wife of Abraham Scroop, one of Preston’s richest merchants, a dissenting Protestant and member of the Corporation. She had given birth a dozen times – the new addition would make it a baker’s dozen – but only half of the children lived to be weaned. Scroop’s fortune was built on what other people do not want – ordure, rags, bones, scrap leather, bits of metal. He dealt with the tannery, selling to them and buying off them, so it was natural enough for the workers there to see him from time to time and get his family news.

  ‘Well if it was born yesterday that would have been after this poor little one. So there’s no one else you can think of? Of the women you see every day, for example, in the skin-yard. Could any have been with child and given birth, without your knowing?’

  ‘No. Everyone in this town knows everything that happens here, either now or tomorrow. Happen it’s some stranger, a peddler-woman or a loose girl chucked out of her parish and wandering the roads.’

  ‘That does happen, indeed. Has any such person been seen recently around Spaw Brow?’

  After a moment’s thought, Ellen shook her head.

  ‘No. Crazy Daisy’s been by the skin-yard with her mats and potions to sell. The day before yesterday, I think it were. But that’s the only woman or girl from out of town that we’ve seen very lately, as far as I know.’

  I knew Daisy by reputation, a poor woman living out on the south side of the estuary, towards the village of Hutton. With her son she made mats and brooms at home, which she hawked around Preston whenever she could wangle a free passage with a boatman coming on to the wharf on the tide. It was difficult to tell Daisy’s age. A long time ago she had been a midwife, and she also made draughts and poultices from herbs.

  ‘She still sells her medicines, then?’

  Ellen smiled.

  ‘To anyone fool enough to buy.’

  ‘And you can’t think of anyone else from outside Preston, apart from Daisy, who was seen here in the past few days?’

  ‘Not to my knowledge.’

  ‘But there is a difficulty, is there not? If the culprit is someone from outside the skin-yard, someone who brought the baby in – in the middle of the night shall we say? – would they have been able to do so? Was the gate not locked at night?’

  ‘Yes, it’s locked, but not until ten o’clock.’

  ‘Whose job is it to lock up?’

  ‘Me dad’s.’

  ‘And do you all sleep inside – all the skinners I mean?’

  ‘We do.’

  ‘There is just one last thing. How often do you handle the ooze in the way you have described?’

  ‘Every day.’

  ‘At the same time?’

  ‘Yes, right after me dinner.’

  ‘And can you be sure that, had it been in the tan-pit on the previous day, Monday, you would have discovered the baby then?’

  ‘Oh yes. I see what you’re saying, Sir. If it had been there on Monday, I would have found it then. I’m sure of that.’

  I rose from my chair and signalled to Furzey that he might stop writing.

  ‘Well that would seem to be the sum of it, Ellen. Thank you very much. Now, about the inquest: you will receive a summons to give evidence. You are the first finder and your evidence is the most important of all. You shan’t be afraid to speak up in front of many people?’

  ‘Oh no, I’ll not. I do sell in the market, you know. I’m not afraid to talk in front of folk.’

  It was perhaps half an hour after she left us that I decided to give myself and the dog Suez a stretch of our legs. Tuesday’s pleasant weather had now given way this morning to gusting winds and flurries of rain, forcing the stallholders of the market to protect their wares under awnings of tarpaulin, which flapped and slapped in the wet breeze. I pulled my hat firmly on to my head and we set out. As soon as we entered Market Place the spaniel was attracted to the sound of voices raised even above the raucous cries of the sellers. I followed him as he bounced towards the disturbance.

  ‘You’ve got no right!’ I heard a female voice shout as I approached. It sounded like that of Ellen Kite. ‘You are a bully and a bastard, Mister!’

  A small crowd had gathered around a trading table, which was the subject of the argument in progress. On the one hand were two Corporation officers, and on the other was Ellen and a dark young man that I took to be her brother.

  The market had always had two official days of trading – Friday and Saturday – but traditionally it had been permissible to sell certain goods, though unofficially, on Wednesday. This was the day on which townspeople or outlying villagers used to bring the surplus produce of their gardens to market, and would sell at the same time sundry home-made items – p
ins and pegs, toys and needlework. Over time this Wednesday event had grown into a substantial fruit and vegetable market, but the selling of household manufactures continued to be tolerated, if not licensed, as long as it kept within limits that did not overlap with the business of the licensed stallholders.

  The row that Suez and I had encountered was over a complaint against the Kites by the Constable of Preston, Oswald Mallender. He had come dressed in his grubby greatcoat and shabby hat and holding his tipstaff, and brought with him the more consequential figure of Abraham Scroop of Water Lane, father of the newborn that I had only an hour before heard tell of. In addition to being a burgess of the town, Scroop was one of the market regulators, with the official title of Searcher and Looker of Leather.

  He was one of those men who liked to exceed others in everything possible. Therefore his carriage had wheels of greater diameter than any other in town, his house had taller windows and his servants wore the most splendid livery.

  ‘This stall is unlicensed,’ Scroop was saying, with a wag of his forefinger, ‘and the goods you are selling are of such low quality that they bring disgrace to the leather trade of Preston. As Searcher of Leather I therefore order this trash – not for the first time – off the market place forthwith.’

  Jonathan Kite, a young man of impressive physique, was breathing heavily through his nose and evidently trying to control his temper.

  ‘We have the right to sell here. We have always enjoyed the right, like these other people.’

  Scroop raised his finger.

  ‘Mr Kite, I am telling you – and Mr Mallender here will second me – that you must produce a trading licence, and if you cannot do so you must clear off out of the market.’

  Kite turned and appealed to the stallholders nearby.

  ‘Licence? Who has a licence? None of us has a licence on a Wednesday.’

  ‘I am not concerned with any others. As Looker and Searcher of Leather I am concerned only with the commodity you are selling, to wit, leather goods. Stuff as inferior as this lowers all Preston’s leather in the eyes of the world. More reputable producers—’

  ‘More reputable? That’s your cronies on the Corporation. I know what you’re playing at.’